07.02.08

ne of the more intriguing developments at the moment is the joining of Linspire and Xandros [1, 2, 3]. The CEO of Xandros rarely speak to the press and it’s virtually impossible to find information about him on the Web. Regardless, one of the reasons Xandros is still mentioned every now and then is the ASUS Eee PC. The following new article about the acquisition mentioned that too.

A customized version of the Xandros distro is bundled with the popular Asus EeePC.

Several months ago, Florian von Kurnatowski from Xandros (he had worked at Scalix, which was acquired by Xandros as well) said in reference to the Eee PC that there was “no impact or royalties to Redmond in this case, most of it open source, the stuff that’s not ours and Asus’ own development, and given the numbers this little thingy leaves the building in, actually one of the most successful end-user products based on open technology, ever.”

When I asked Typaldos whether Xandros is licensing its Linux OS to Asus for the EeePC and how Xandros makes its money from the 1-1.5 million netbooks he referred to, he responded by saying it’s ‘complicated.’

What does that mean? He doesn’t say, but it sure seems like another secret arrangement from a company that repackages and charges for Free software. As we wrote earlier, negations with Linspire began as far back as last year. It was a back-room negotiation as Kevin Carmony bitterly put it.

[I]t’s safe to say that no one saw Xandros, the oldest of the desktop Linux companies thanks to its Corel Linux ancestry, buying Linspire, the desktop Linux perhaps best known for being the first Linux to openly embrace proprietary software. So how did this deal happen? Why did it happen? Here’s what Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos had to say about the surprising deal.

So, to Typaldos it was a great match up of where Xandros was and where Linspire had been trying to go. “Products like the ASUS Eee PC have demonstrated the huge potential market for Linux-based OEM netbook solutions and other emerging mobile Linux platforms. The Linspire CNR technologies provide the fourth “E” as in ‘easy to maintain.’ including on-demand delivery of a growing number of Linux utilities and games.”

To shed some light on the irrelevance of Xandros and Linspire compared to something like Ubuntu, see the image below (click for a full-sized version). Distro Watch tells a similar story.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again